In the spring of 2014 M - Museum Leuven is mounting Belgium’s first solo exhibition of work by the French artist Isabelle Cornaro (°1974), who lives and works in Paris. In 2010 she won the Prix Fondation d'entreprise Ricard. Her oeuvre manifests an interest in the way our perception of reality is dictated historically and culturally. Cornaro’s initial training as an art historian specializing in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Western art has influenced her original visual language. For example, there is a strong association between her work and forms and compositions from the past, ranging from the baroque or classicism to modernistic abstraction.

In her sculptures and installations Isabelle Cornaro plays with the aesthetics of both ordinary everyday objects and objets d’art by integrating them formally or conceptually into a new context. For instance, she might group these objects round a specific theme or arrange them according to visual techniques such as scale, perspective lines or light and shadow effects, thereby calling into question our conventional view of these objects and the way we look at her work. Her videos, high reliefs and murals are a continuation of this study of observation and perception. Moreover, they underline her great sensitivity to texture, material and colour.